Thursday, June 23, 2016

Business benefits of Telematics

Telematics can provide tremendous value to OEMs and Tier-1 vendors in improving the quality of their products and also delivering a superior customer experience.

Jotting down my thoughts on the business value of implementing telematics.

1. Predictive Maintenance - Every organization wants to reduce the maintenance costs associated with sudden unexpected failure of components in a vehicle. The downtime that occurs due to a failure can result in huge losses for all parties involved. Thus, it is imperative to make the paradigm shift from reactive maintenance to preventive/predictive maintenance.
Telematics would provide organizations with the ability to discover issues before they cause downtime and take the appropriate proactive steps to reduce costs. Various machine learning techniques are used to identify patterns.

2. Improve Product Quality - The insights gathered from telematics can be used as a feedback loop for product development teams. It would also help the management prioritize R&D investments in the appropriate areas.

3. Optimize Warranty Costs - Telematics data can provide visibility of anticipated component/part recalls and accordingly forecast warranty reserve. Using the power of analytics on telematics data, we can also identify suspicious warranty claims and effectively structure future warranty contracts.

   

Friday, June 10, 2016

Ruminating on LoRa technology

LoRa (Long Range) is a wireless technology developed for the internet of things. It enables long-range data communications with very low power requirement - e.g. a transmitter battery can last for 10 years and communicate with nodes over 15-20 kms !

LoRa technology was initially developed by SemTech, but now has become a standard and is being further developed by the LoRa alliance.

A good tutorial to get the basic of LoRa is available here - http://www.radio-electronics.com/info/wireless/lora/basics-tutorial.php

Most IoT applications also need only to exchange small data packets with low throughput. LoRa is designed for such low data-rate connectivity.